I remember posting a couple of weeks ago with regard to how Augustine treated possible conflicts with science in his day and Faith.What he recommended is apropos here.
What are we required to believe about how God created? What should we reject? Apostolic Christians need to affirm all that the Church teaches as matters of faith and morals. We share with other supernaturalists a rejection of pure naturalism, and we believe that the origin of the universe comes from the free will of God. The Church believes Genesis teaches us this truth about the origin of the world because the Bible is God's infallible revelation. But affirming the Bible does not require rejecting all secular science as ungodly. If we take Genesis chapters 1 and 2 seriously, are we required to believe that God made the world in six twenty-four hour days, even if scientific research tends to indicate otherwise?
Hence, this is a situation where Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, should be studied. He offers wisdom for guidance. He was familiar with the science of his day and offered valuable advice for Christians facing a non-Christian world with its ideas about nature. .
Augustine, bishop of Hippo from 395 to his death in 430, wrote commentaries on the Genesis creation narratives five times in his life. His fourth and most important was the Literal Com ment ary on Genesis and it is here that Augustine gives his greatest advice on how to deal with the Bible and its relation to nature. His final attempt, probably written around the same time as the Literal Commentary appears in books 30 to 33 in the City of God.
Why did Augustine spend so much time on the Genesis creation narratives? Augustine encountering different philosophies of his day. These belief systems left a deep impression on him, and he was convinced later that he had to defend the Christian faith against them. He produced some of the most powerful arguments ever offered in defense of God's creation.
Augustine felt that the most dangerous philosophy of his day was Manichaeanism, a system he adhered to prior to his conversion. As he tells us, the Manichees criticized Genesis as cleverly spun tales that had no rational (scientific) value. They derided a God who would need six days to create the world and castigated the same God for creating man in his image. The Manichees often asked questions designed to show the folly of believing Genesis to be true. If man is made in God's image, does God have arms and legs? If God created at a moment of time, what was he doing before he created?
Augustine was convinced that two of the most powerful tools in combating false science were reason and sense experience. . Augustine never used the term "science" in its modern sense nor did any other ancient writer, Christian or pagan. This was not because there was no science in antiquity but because it was called natural philosophy. Natural philosophy, up until the nineteenth century generally, meant the knowledge of a specific science and the philosophy of nature implied by that knowledge.
Augustine's first guideline is to recognize the purpose of Scripture. Human language is imprecise. To understand what someone is telling us, we must hear the words and discern the person's intention. The Bible is a special case because it has human authors but behind each one there is a divine author, the Holy Spirit. When we read the Bible, we want to know both the human and divine authors' intentions. The divine intention or purpose of Scripture may be discerned from the language used in a biblical text.
The purpose of the Bible is redemptive, said Augustine. God gave us the Bible to instruct us in the knowledge of salvation, not science. In his Literal Commentary Augustine asked what Scripture teaches about the shape or the form of the heavens, a topic that many ancient writers addressed. Are the heavens spherical or flat like a disc? Or, does it matter? He responded: "Many scholars engage in lengthy discussion on these matters, but the sacred writers with their deeper wisdom have omittedthem. Such subjects are of no profit for those who seek beatitude, and, what is worse, they take up very precious time that ought to be given to what is spiritually beneficial." Augustine did not think that natural knowledge was worthless, only that it was inferior to knowledge of God, who made nature. Augustine was simply saying that the biblical authors were not giving a definitive theory of the heavens in a scientific fashion.
Augustine warned against a danger among Christians of his day and ours. If the Christian insists on a certain scientific theory as if it were the teaching of the Bi ble, and it turned out to be wrong, then the unbeliever will reject the Bible wholesale and miss the saving purpose God has in composing it. This danger is so real that Augustine emphasized it a number of times in his writings. Unreliable knowledge of nature is not ****ing but it can be a stumbling block "if he thinks his view of nature is grounded in orthodox christian doctrine, and dares obstinately to affirm something he does not understand." In this case, the Christian's lack of true knowledge becomes an obstacle to the unbeliever's embracing the truth of the gospel. The great harm, is that "people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions and . . . the writers of Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men."
Christians sometimes make themselves obstacles to the salvation of others rather than instruments of it. They do so when they equate a scientific theory with the meaning of the Bible. Augustine was well aware of this danger already in the fifth century. The situation is unchanged today, 1600 years after Augustine wrote. His solution is humility both in the interpretation of nature and the interpretation of Scripture. By recognizing that the Bible is more about "the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven" than it is about "the motion and orbit of the stars, their size and relative positions, and the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon." He warns against self- imposed authorities in biblical interpretation: "Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books."
Is there nothing then in Scripture that bears on science? Augustine did not think that the Bible was irrelevant to nature. That would be to divide truth, and for Augustine truth is one. His second guideline is to recognize the harmony between natural knowledge and scriptural knowledge. Science and interpretation do not teach the same subjects, but neither do they contradict one another. You will find not physics in the Bible. Scripture says nothing about vectors and atoms. Nor does physics teach us about the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ.
But suppose a biologist says that the only explanation for the origin of cells is spontaneous generation, that is, origin without any previous cause. The Christian immediately knows that something wrong. Such a view contradicts the statements of Genesis that all things have their origin from God. Even if we interpret the chaos and formlessness (in Hebrew tohu and bohu) of Genesis 1:2 as a primordial soup, verse one still affirms that the primordial soup came from God ("In the beginning God created the heavens and earth"). What should we do?
The Literal Commentary advises a two-step procedure. First, we must evaluate whether the scientific claim has any validity. This must be done by the methods of science, empirical observation and theoretical reasoning. It is not enough to quote the Bible against a scientific theory. If we are unsure about the conclusion, we can consider it false. "The truth is rather in what God reveals than in what groping men surmise." This would be true in the case of spontaneous generation. It is a very different claim from those made about the structure of cells. Cell structures can be verified and tested. Spontaneous generation cannot be verified. And science cannot make statements about what cannot be, only about what is. So, Augustine would say that we can regard spontaneous generation as false unless someone can verify it.
Suppose someone says that the earth is no more than ten thousand years old. Again, we should test this claim by the means that science has at its disposal. For well over a hundred years historical geology has developed tests to show that the earth must be far older than ten thousand years. These tests are cross-checked and rechecked to make sure the time estimates are not flawed. Now what should we do? Shall we insist that the Bible teaches that the earth is no more than ten thousand years old? Could it be that our interpretation is wrong? Augustine advises the second step: "But if they are able to establish their doctrine with proofs that cannot be denied, we must show that this statement of Scripture . . . is not opposed to the truth of their conclusions." He urges us to change our interpretation of Scripture, not because Scripture is to be ruled by science, but because no two truths made by God will contradict one another. All truth comes from God, whether discovered by science or by the Church in its interpretation of Scripture. The first question we must ask is whether a particular scientific theory is well-founded. If it is, then we must make sure we don't read the Bible in a manner that contradicts sound knowledge of nature.
The most striking feature of Augustine's commentaries on Genesis is his lack of firm conclusions. He offered different ways of reading the text but made few of them binding on his readers. How did he know when his reading was acceptable, and how can we know how to read Genesis properly? The Apostolic Church has been guided by Augustine's wisdom because it has never definitively ruled on how Genesis should be read.
Yet Augustine's interpretations were not open-ended. He suggested the following procedure that applies to Genesis as well as any other biblical text. He said that we first should seek to expound the author's meaning according to the historical or literal sense. The literal sense for Augustine is the sense the words bear in their original historical-linguistic context. If we are unable to agree on the author's meaning, we at least should interpret Scripture according to the wider context of the Bible as a whole. We should make sure that our interpretations of a particular text are consistent with what the Bible says elsewhere. If this proves difficult, we must interpret the Bible within the boundaries of the Apostolic faith. Augustine directs this advice against those who rashly assert the meaning of the Bible on uncertain and doubtful matters. It is better to be humble than to proclaim boldly opinions on Scripture that might be wrong. The key to Augustine's approach to the Bible lies in his willingness to read the Bible with the Church.
How does Augustine's wisdom guide us in our present situation? Application of his principles can be seen in one of the most misunderstood episodes in the history of science and religion, the Galileo Affair. Augustine's Literal Commentary played a key role in Galileo's many-sided interactions with the Church. Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, written in 1615, appealed to Augustine's authority by arguing that Scripture was intended to lead us to salvation, not to give us theories of natural science. But Galileo recognized that the Church was under no obligation to endorse the heliocentric theory of the universe unless he or someone else could provide proof of its truth. Galileo fully believed in the truth of the Copernican theory, but he did not have sufficient proof of its truth in 1616, when the Church's Congregation of the Index ruled on the matter.
The Church, represented by Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, also recognized the saving purpose of Scripture. Bellarmine said that if the Church had in its possession proof of the truth of the new astronomy, it would have to refrain from any judgment. But that proof was lacking by the standards of the day. The Church hierarchy would not have ruled on the question at all had Galileo and others not tried to offer a theological defense of the theory. When the Congregation of the Index issued its decision, it did not totally condemn the heliocentric theory. It simply said that Copernicus' book was forbidden "until corrected." It condemned totally two other books that gave theological defenses of the new theory because they claimed that a moving earth was compatible with Scripture. Since there was no proof that the earth was moving in the early seventeenth century, Church officials thought it rash to defend that notion without sufficient proof.
How does this example help us today? The Church recognizes that it is called to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ in matters of faith and morals, not to rule on the validity of scientific theories. The latter judgment must be left to the scientific community. Yet, scientists sometimes make claims that their theories imply a certain philosophy of life. Carl Sagan, for example, often espoused a materialist and naturalist philosophy, claiming that it grew out of modern science. A materialist philosophy is incompatible with Genesis and Christian belief. The Church is called not only to teach the truth of the gospel but to warn the faithful against philosophies that are not consistent with the gospel. When the Church is uncertain about a scientific claim, it can ask for proof for these claims. When proof according to some measure is forthcoming, the Church must weigh this proof in the light of its total mission to articulate the truth. If proof is not forthcoming, the Church rightly can withhold judgment.
Augustine was not afraid of knowledge from any direction because he knew the Source of all truth. He was open to all truth from any direction. The God who made nature also inspired Scripture and never would contradict himself. Christians can be sure that God's truth in nature does not contradict God's truth in Scripture.
), but well within the range of modern humans (some people have big heads if they have large bodies - obviously!)